


Lovesick

by Schattenfeuer



Category: Nightmare Harem (Visual Novel)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Gen, Heavy Angst, M/M, Other, Physical Abuse, Reader-Insert, Toxic Relationships, Unhealthy Relationships, Yandere, genderneutral reader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:28:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 9,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25932886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schattenfeuer/pseuds/Schattenfeuer
Summary: They are infected, sick from a plague to the mind, they suffer from the worst of all illnesses. They are in love.
Relationships: Kaim/Reader, Kurt/Reader, Levy/Reader, Lucas/Reader, Lucia/Reader, Mefy/Reader, Mikael/reader, Noel/Reader, Oswald/Reader, Ricardo/Reader
Kudos: 20





	1. Kurt

At first, you thought his behaviour was adorable, in a childish, highly immature way. You just went with it and you actually had a lot of fun playing those little games with him, the back and forth between you two was easy and simple and sweet, it reminded you of cotton candy in its initial sweetness and the tendency to make you sick to your stomach, now that you thought back to it. You could have gone someone, tell them about this, but who would believe you anyways?

You were the newcomer, the new kid on the block, while he was the sweetheart of the estate, the maids loved him, even Kaim had a soft spot for him. Not to mention the way Lucia and the others interacted with him. They would have laughed in your face or patted your head and told you it was just a harmless little crush. And had you pressed on, they would have become impatient with your unreasonable attitude, would have told you that you, as the adult, should suck it up and grow a spine. He was just a little kid, half your age and size, how could he be anything but innocent?

Yes, you could already hear their voices in your mind, which was exactly why you didn’t went to anyone. Why you ‘sucked it up and grew a spine’ as your imagination had lovingly called it. Kurt was your shadow. He was always around you, holding onto your hand, your arm, had his arms around your waist in one way or another, he was always touching you. And his bird, that terrible beast with its high pitched screeching and beady eyes, was always perched on his shoulder. 

Once you had asked if you could pet it. The damn creature had bitten you so hard that your finger was still bleeding half an hour after that incident. Kurt, while smiling so sickeningly sweet that your stomach tied itself into a tight knot of unease, had bandaged your wound, scolded you for startling his poor pet bird Lou. You had felt like a complete idiot and he knew it, had willingly allowed you to walk into the open knife just so that he could belittle you for his own amusement. 

His mischief played perfectly into the innocence he showed around others. However dared to get close to you, would suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of increasingly more childish pranks, until they gave up out of pure annoyance, not that you could be entirely too mad about that. In their place, you would have given up on yourself as well, as interesting as you were for them - a human living under one roof with demons - your novelty was not worth the trouble they got in exchange. 

Just three months, that was what you kept telling yourself, when he was once again grating your nerves with eerie skill. Of course all while the others were looking onto you two with a fond smile. How glad they were, that the young boy had finally found a friend that was not a bird. How innocent the first love was, how sweet. You were such a kind person for playing along, but they also warned you, that you should not cruelly feed him empty hope. You weren’t doing anything, except trying to survive this hellish routine in this estate. 

Kurt escalated silently, a creeping process that caught you in its middle, used your reluctance in the beginning as a catalyst to grow more and more daring. Soon, you weren’t even safe in your own bed as he would crawl in after you, curl up against your side and keep poking you between the ribs with nimble fingers until you would relent and put your arms around him. 

When Lucia invited you out during your last days in Nightmare, you could have cried in relief. Seeing Kurt’s already small figure shrink with each spin of the carriage’s wheels was the balm for your tattered, strained soul, you couldn’t remember when was the last time you were this giddy for a daytrip. You had fun, you saw new things without having the young demon constantly glued at your hip, so much in fact, that you actually spilled a silent tear or two upon your return to the estate. 

Kurt was waiting for you at the gate, latched onto your side the moment Lucia helped you out of the carriage. He smiled but it did not reach his large eyes and in that moment you were sure about your suspicions. The only thing that kept Kurt from acting out his murderous thoughts was the limitations of his own body and even those were waning each passing day. His chatter filled your ears and turned into white noise only to cut off the moment your bedroom door closed behind the two of you. 

“You shouldn’t let another man touch you”, cold shivers crept down your rigid spine as a shadow fell over Kurt’s bright eyes, a strange light sparking in them, filling them with emotions too heavy, too twisted, too much of everything sinister for his youthful face. It mirrored in the way his lips pulled and stretched themselves to an unhinged smile as he reached up, standing on the tips of his toes to reach your face. His hands on your cheeks were cold and clammy, you felt frozen and terrified like never before in your sheltered life as you saw your own wide eyed, startled expression mirrored in his eyes. “After all, you belong to me.”


	2. Noel

Even before you actually met him face to face, you could always feel someone’s gaze on you, it was like a needle jabbing the soft skin at the base of your skull over and over again, the sensation crept you out, made you uncomfortable in your own skin as you could not pinpoint the source of this piercing gaze down. It didn’t help either if you pulled the curtains in your bedroom close or left them wide open, no matter what you did, each morning you woke up to your bed feeling too warm from your body heat alone, to the faint smell of bitter medicine and coppery undertones of blood hanging in the air. 

It made your head hurt, you felt queasy and dizzy, just like you had drunk too much wine for dinner and just as paranoid whenever you stepped outside your bedroom door to once again suffer under the stranger’s needle jab like glare. Foolish as you had been, you had actually been relieved to stumble over a knife wielding assassin that one night, when he had taken you with him, you had cried under your breath because you finally got out of this haunted estate, away from the medicine and blood smell in your bedroom, from the feeling of getting pierced by a glare alone. 

What a fool you had been, to discard your safety, your freedom like this, for what was to come was a thousand times worse than whatever sensation had haunted you before. Blinding light and a tight grip later, and you found yourself locked in a castle high up between the clouds, with empty hallways and emptier rooms, the few people living inside just as hollow as their home. One was frozen to his very core, the other unhinged in the worst way possible and the third of them, your captor, the person always holding on to your arm with bruising strength, was more machine than a living, breathing person. 

Noel knew your name before you could tell him, he knew your favorite color and the amount of pillows you preferred to sleep with, tidbits of mismatched information that you were slow to put together. Because what it indicated was terrifying, because you were still struggling to adjust to another new environment after being ripped out of your old one like one would pull out unwanted weed. You were shaking by the time you had figured the terrible truth out, wheezing with barely contained panic when the picture inside your mind came together to form one ugly truth. 

From the moment you had stepped a foot onto Nightmare’s soil, you had become prey. Not for any run of the mill predator but for the most efficient of them all, an apex hunter with a stainless track record, he was more than unwilling to let you go once he had gotten a good taste of you. And that he had gotten. The smell of medicine and blood you had noticed hanging ever so faintly in the air? It clung to Noel’s skin, his hair and tickled your nose whenever you were in his presence. The too warm bed which had bugged you ever since you discovered it? The same heat threatened to suffocate you at night now, when Noel wrapped his arms and blankets tightly around you, tight enough to immobilize you, it seeped into your skin like a disease. 

And then there was the jabbing needle that had been the stranger’s constant gaze, fixated upon you whenever you made a single step. It was not hard to fill that part in, not when you were now confronted with it in full force and all around the clock, Noel’s gaze was as intense as the rest of him was apathetic. In a way, you wished he would just get it over with and be done, lock you up so that you could get a moment to breathe without his very presence suffocating the spark of life inside you. 

In a way however, you were glad for the self imposed isolation that ruled over Sky Castle, because you had seen Noel come home with hands caked brown from dried blood, with that coldness gleaming in his eyes, giving them more than ever the impression of being made out of cut ruby, gemstones for a perfect statue instead of the windows to the soul for a living, breathing being. You had wanted to run away when he had found you, his clothes still soaked and wet from spilled crimson, only his hands clean and cold from washing them in haste, as they touched your cheek, your hair, curled around the back of your nape to pull you closer, cutting off any chance of escape before you could even flinch. 

Why, you asked with shaky voice and trembling hands as you were carefully combing the matted strands of silver away and out of his face, because you learnt quickly that your touch was the only thing that soothed and calmed him down, his hunger for it made him almost appear human. Because they wanted to take you away, he answered, blunt as always, his hands gripping tighter, scared that you would slip right through his fingers, like petal blossoms on the wind. You wished they had succeeded in taking you away. 

Even in all the time you spent there, you hardly interacted with any of the other two inhabitants of Sky Castle, you caught glimpses of them from afar, heard pieces of conversations on the wind but before you could do anything, Noel would pull your arm, tug you away into a quiet corner. When you made the mistake of asking him once what he was thinking as he kept staring at you with narrowed eyes, the most wicked, brutal words started to spill over his lips like black tar, filling your ears with schemes upon schemes of how he would take out any rival, how he would even not hesitate to raise arms against his own lord if it meant to keep you close and as his. A part of you was still frozen and terrified long after hearing this uncharacteristic rant. 

“I found you after all”, he had concluded, face buried in the crook of your neck and voice muffled against your skin as his arms were tightly around your midsection. “So I get to keep you. There’s no place where you could hide from me.”


	3. Levy

He hated your guts the moment he laid eyes upon you, looking all lost and innocent like a lamb about to be led to the sacrificial slaughter. You were just his brother’s type - his own type - so he hated you even more. Every time you passed him in the hallways, he sneered, his mouth turned into a downward frown and you caught a glimpse of very inhumane, very sharp fangs as he gnashed his teeth and glared daggers at you with disgust coloring his entire expression. 

At first, you attempted to talk to him, thinking that maybe you just caught him on the wrong foot. That this was just a misunderstanding. He caught the scent of your hair wafting off you and tickling his nose and started to yell at you, voice dark and rough with anger, causing you to flinch and scramble for safety, least he would physically lash out at you. Being far beyond intimidated, you now tried to avoid him.

Too bad that you hadn’t kept the mischievous streak of the estate’s inhabitants in mind, as you found yourself pushed into the position of Levy’s personal servants mere minutes after the position was mysteriously vacated. Your first duty? He wordlessly pressed a pair of dirt caked gloves into your hands, ordered you to discard them or wash them or do whatever with them. In the end, you opted for burning them, because even the strongest soap could not wash out the blackish stains out of the fine fabric and the smell of the dirt was giving you nausea. 

Only days after you started your new, terrifying job, you noticed some of your meager belongings had gone missing, but no matter how methodically you combed through the room given to you, through the hallways or even the garden, you could not find it, at all. It saddened you at first, but you were able to shrug it off, to proceed with your day under Levy’s tyranny, oblivious to the fact that he had been clutching onto something small and very familiar all day. 

Days melted together and you were still convinced that he hated your very being, but you were unable to get away from him, like someone was playing a cruel prank on you, even when you had your day off from work, you kept running into Levy, be it while taking a stroll through the garden or by accompanying Kurt and Kaim into the nearby town, no matter where you went, you could count on a flash of blue and a very familiar voice snarking away at your confidence like it was your fault in the first place. 

Levy knew how to shatter your self esteem into many little pieces, even without trying he managed to make you cry on a nearly daily basis, causing you to run off and drop your work for the remainder of the day, because you could not handle the insults and abuse he kept hurling at you with neck breaking speed and vicious aggressiveness. While you were gone, he snarled and paced, kept fidgeting with the little trinkets he had taken from you and hidden in his pocket, something of you to keep you close, something he could possess and make his own. 

When one of the other servants started to take pity on you, he was the first to notice, watched with sharp eyes and disapproving glare how you kept talking to the other man, yet he bit his tongue, for now. Instead of lashing out immediately, he tried to change his tactic, for what else was this but a war for your attention and affection? He’d rather having you looking at him with fear in your eyes than gazing upon another man with that soft look on your face. This was not the first time he had picked up his sword and it would not be the last time, up until people started to mutter about you, that you brought bad luck, that people around you disappeared or were hurt. And that was fine for him. 

Up until the point where fear would no longer do the trick for him. Now he wanted you to meet his gaze, to stay instead of scurrying off like a scared little mouse, but his lack of kindness drove a wrench in every plan of his. So he could just watch, helplessly, as you acted so wearily around him, every step careful and slow as if you were walking on eggshells, it sickened him, because all he wanted now was to hold you close. The desire was wreaking havoc within him, it ate away at his sanity much like his causic words broke every last bit of your confidence. 

You shied away from him, he chased after you and onwards this vicious cycle of regret and obsession went, you were not save, nowhere in this estate or the town, as he stuck to you like a second shadow, your belongings slowly dwindling away until you had nothing left, as his shrine of you grew with every single day. Only then, small gifts started to appear on your doorstep, your bed, in your wardrobe and on your chair at the breakfast table, each one exquisite and made with great attention to detail and each unnerving you more than the last. Because they appeared to be custom made for your taste. Because you were not close to anyone in this hellhole. And because they kept coming, kept appearing until you had more than when you had first stepped foot into Nightmare. 

And the game of hot and cold with Levy continued, until you were so drained that you broke into tears in the middle of serving breakfast, you cried and cried and cried into Lucia’s shoulder as he took you away, into the privacy of his own quarters, so much that your eyes turned red and puffy, that your voice turned raspy and hoarse and you didn’t even had the strength left to stand up straight. All the while, Levy seethed, jealousy and rage and love and obsession tipping the scale inside his mind until it toppled over, until his hands itched to pick up his sword once again, this time to hurt the only true rival he had ever had. 

You couldn’t even scream when he snatched you on your way back to your bedroom, only weakly struggle against the overpowering strength of his grip and flinch when the door slammed shut behind you two. Shock numbed the pain of his backhanded slap across your cheek, dulled the sting of your knees hitting the hard floor and paralyzed your mind as you caught a glimpse of something very familiar hastily stuffed underneath his bed. A low cry fell from your lips as he grabbed fists full of your hair, forced your terrified, wide eyed gaze to meet his and you felt like drowning in the darkened gold of his eyes. 

It poured down your throat and made it impossible to breathe, fear poured out of your every pore as cold sweat as his grip became even tighter, more painful, he loomed over you like the grim reaper’s scythe, rage twisting every stumbled word from your mouth into yet another flimsy excuse on why he was only second best to everyone. 

“You belong to me!”, he snarled into your face, still hurting and swollen from where he had hit you, his despair and hurt and anger sending your mind spinning in utter confusion and terror. “You will learn to only love me! ME and no one else! Especially not HIM!”


	4. Kaim

He took you under his wing the moment you touched down upon Nightmare, dropped out of your own world, you stumbled, fell from the sky like a shooting star to land right into his lap. It felt like fate, like a lucky alignment of the stars, just right. And you had certainly potential, he told you that much in your very first, proper conversation, at that time, you had still been confused, your mind struggling to catch up to your body and you had just nodded along while clutching to the steaming cup of tea he had graciously prepared for you. 

Ever since it was decided that you would work during your stay at this lavish estate, he seemed to look at you with a certain glint in his eyes, one you mistook as friendly mischief and the first signs of budding comarady. He was strict, with you more than with anyone else, but you thought little of this, after all it made sense to you. You were a total newcomer while all the others, even Kurt, had years of experience upon you, so there was no surprise that Kaim was especially hard on you. 

Maybe he had a perfectionist streak or he simply wanted you to do it properly the first time around, either way, you found excuse after excuse for the downright obsessiveness with which he was after you, like a hawk on the hunt, he watched you work, his hands were always touching you in some way or the other, innocent touched that never lingered for too long, just a small push here, a little yank there. 

Hold your back straight, your chin high, don’t walk so loudly, he was a well of good advise and a bottomless one on top of that. After correcting your posture, the way you talked, walked and smiled was next. What started in your mind as good intentions quickly became overbearing, as nothing you did was good enough, his disapproving frown always in the corner of your vision. 

You were too loud, smiled too freely, acted far too familiar with the others, the list went on and on and the more point he added to it, the deeper the frown marring his features became, until his eyes had lost all their mirth and gleamed in a cold light, reminded you too much of precious stones for your liking. The sharpness of his gaze became cutting, you felt like he was skinning you alive with his eyes alone. Your workload began to decrease, tasks trickling out of your reach like water running wild, until there were none left. 

Once more you found yourself disorientated, your routine on which you had relied so much, ripped out of your hands and again he swooped in, took you once more under his wing. Only that this time around the pressure became insane. You caught a glimpse behind his finely crafted facade and the chaos you saw behind that shook your very bones. His touches were no longer fleeting, instead they started to linger like a sticky substance coating your skin, as even more things slowly were denied to you. 

You were no longer allowed to walk around alone, had to be in his sight at all times or remain in your room, he even locked the door to make sure you would not stray. It was him that put out your clothes for the next day. It was also him that removed your hairbrush from your hand to get to that task himself, sorting your twisted curls anew in a way that was not you at all, but you didn’t dare to protest when you caught a glimpse of his enchanted mien in the mirror. 

Slowly but surely, Kaim cut you off from everyone and he did it so naturally, so slowly that it seemed almost impossible to notice. The change was slow but it was happening, decision by decision he reduced you to your very basic bones, wiped away all that was unwanted, unloved, undesired about you, your looks, your character, even your mannerisms and began the painstaking process of putting you back together into a new you, a better you, a you that you did not recognize at all. 

He was not cruel to you, he never hurt you directly. Never once laid a finger on you with a violent intention in mind. But he knew how to place his words, he strung you up like a marionette and pulled your strings to make you dance to his tune, you never once caught him red handed, but you knew that he was slowly thinning out the crowd of people that knew the old you, the real you. The you that you had been before he had turned you into the perfect little doll that you were now. 

“You did so well, my pretty little doll”, he murmured with a sickly sweet voice into your ear, as you sat motionless on the chair in front of the vanity, staring straight ahead with an empty expression and dulled eyes while he gently pulled the brush through your locks. Who was this person staring back at you? You did not recognize the apathetic mien nor the color of the hair. But you did recognize the lovestruck expression and the familiar glint in his eyes as he bent down to press a short kiss on your temple. “They are all going to love you, but you belong only to me.”


	5. Mikael

You weren’t even a full day in Nightmare before he had learnt of your existence. How, you could not know, could not figure out. All you had to go on were clues, scattered around like bread crumbs for pigeons, it just made sense to you, after he did it. After he had you snatched right from underneath Lucia’s nose. A short stroll to calm your raging thoughts and suddenly a cloth was pressed against your nose and mouth, a bitter scent was biting your gums and throat, before your eyelids grew heavy from artificial exhaustion. Just before you felt someone pick you up, you saw a blinding light, then you were out like a snuffed out candle, not even a thin curl of smoke left.

You came back to your senses laying on your side, curled up in a mountain of pillows and heavy blankets, while cold light shone down on you from a glass dome stretching elegantly over your head, the same one that kept spinning and felt like it was filled with fog and lead, you had a foul taste on your tongue and your throat itched, hurt from dryness. The blinding light of the morning sun rising fell right through the bars of your cage and cast ominous shadows upon your bleary eyed form, as you still struggled to comprehend how you had ended up here. 

One moment, you had been watching the stars surrounded by rose bushes and flower beds, the next you were in a cage, a tall one, sure, equipped with luxurious things, but still a cage, on top of it, you were alone, in an environment so strange that it made your skin crawl. The time passed strangely here, you saw how hours melted together into each other at the change of the sun’s position on the horizon, but the isolation, the silence did well in making you grow more and more tense, up until you felt just about ready to snap. 

Shaking against the cage’s bars did nothing but burn your palms as the gleaming metal grew hot and cold underneath your touch, screaming caused only your echo to answer you in a choir of mocking howling. And when finally, you heard footsteps coming closer, you sobbed with relief, ready to throw yourself on your knees just to get some answers. The man that appeared looked fit to stem from the pages of a fairy tale, you stared wide eyed and for a long moment silenced by the power he radiated with the same ease that your heart continued to beat within your chest. 

Something about the way he - Mikael as you learnt - looked at you, unsettled you deeply, made you want to curl up and hide away, anything just to get away from the dissecting gaze of those hollow, cold eyes, their color reminded you of blood freshly spilled on ice. He talked to you, sometimes, but his voice was commanding, domineering, he seemed to search for something within you and to never find it. 

The only time you saw something close to an emotion on his face was when he caught you during an attempt to break free from your prison. He just stood there and watched, amused with his arms crossed in front of his chest, as you fought tooth and nail and failed still miserably, only to give up and start crying, because the vanity of it all came crashing down on you like an emotional tidal wave. You screamed at him, you sobbed, begged and pleaded, anything to soften this heart of stone which seemed to reside within his chest, but your very efforts rolled off him like drops of rain water. And then his questions began anew, his thirst for knowledge never seemed satisfied.

Even when he had wrung the very last of your stories out, had bled you dry of every memory and human emotion, he still did not deemed you worthy of any kind of emotional response. And you sunk into a swamp made out of your own misery and utter helplessness. Even now, during your entire stay in this silver cage, he did not seemed to see you as a person, viewed you with the same gaze you would give to an expensive, exotic pet. And there was nothing you could do.

If all your memories, all your stories could not reach him, nothing else could, he was untouchable to you and this knowledge took the last of your will, you started to deny your cold food, watched the water in your cup stagnate and condense away and envied it for the freedom it had but you lost. His visits became more frequent and you started to blur them all together into one long, drawn out conversation about the same damn topic, over and over and over again. You watched your body grow weaker and so did he, you smiled when you didn’t even found the strength to sit up, as he started to frown. And finally, you closed your eyes in what you deemed eternal slumber. 

“Wake up, my pet.”, you were jolted awake by an icy, domineering voice, over your head you saw the familiar dome out of glass and the cage’s bars bleeding together in the blur of your tear veiled gaze. Next to your bed out of pillows and blankets, Mikael loomed like a pale shadow, his red eyes hollow and cold and alight with something akin to macabre pride. You were alive. Despite starving for what felt like eternity, your body was once more full and healthy, alive once more. And he smiled. “Whatever made you think I would let my precious songbird just fly away? You still have so many songs for me to enjoy after all.”


	6. Lucas

He was so sick of it. Sick of always being the one on the sidelines, sick of just being able to watch. Sick of playing matchmaker for your happiness only to watch it crumble in the end like castles built on salt and sand. They all could not make you really happy, all they did was hurt you, kill you, damage this precious heart of yours. Or worse, they took you for granted. The sacrifices you made for them, timeline after timeline after timeline, you threw everything dear to you away to stay at their side and they didn’t even think twice about demanding more and more from you. 

Parasites, all of them, he felt jealousy and indignation burn in the back of his throat, tasting bitter like bile and just as potent in eating through his resolve. But he was not important, what he desired would always come second, because you were the beating heart of Nightmare’s future. You were the sun around which he orbited, drawn towards you and unable to resist the pull of your gravitation field. It was your happiness that counted, what was a bit of heartbreak if it made you so very happy? 

But you weren’t happy. He watched you sacrifice yourself, watched you getting beaten and broken, discarded and abandoned, but the one thing that hurt him the most were the times when you left. When you discarded Nightmare like an old coat, left it useless and empty behind, worse, when you left him. When you just forgot about him, as if he had just been another piece of your imagination, destined to fade away into oblivion. 

Yet, he smiled as he once again watched you stumble around, confused and bleary eyed, shocked and out of your element, this would be the beginning of something new, he promised to himself, to you, as he watched your restless form toss and turn in your sleep. This time he would stay close, would be the guiding hand to lead you through this swamp of immorality and selfishness towards the light in which you belonged. You were too good for any of them. 

Showing you Nightmare’s beauty was just one step in making sure none of them would ever sink their filthy claws into you ever again, he would smite them all if he had to, even though part of his mind rebelled against the thought of hurting another, for you he would do it. And after he would have spilled all the blood in this world, after drowning all of those parasites, those rats in an ocean of crimson, he would cleanse you of the stain their touches left on you. 

No need to worry, he would be gentle with you, like you deserved, he would treat you like the deity that you was to him, your every wish was his command and even if it would break his heart and soul into a million little pieces, it would be an honor to end this way, because it was via your command, it was your will that would reform Nightmare and if his destruction was necessary, than he would not hesitate a single breath to rip himself apart. 

He knew he was sick, he knew this was not normal, he was not stupid after all, not blind to the way you flinched away from every single show of his devotion. He could see the way your eyes widened in silent panic when he pressed your hands around his throat and begged you to leave a mark on him, anything to prove that he belonged to you, that you wanted him, even just a fraction of your love and attention was enough to sustain him for centuries. 

When one plan to win you over failed, he simply jumped to the next, hectic to make up for his mistakes, you were right to reject him every time around, because it was not perfect, not the way you deserved it to be.

“I can do better!”, he pulled at your clothes as he knelt in front of you, golden eyes ablaze with a fire that made you sick to your stomach and a smile stained by tears and drool. “Let me prove it to you! I’ll do anything, anything for you!”


	7. Ricardo

He only saw you once, one single time and it had been enough to seal your fate. He had only exchanged a few short words with you and he was already smitten, just one look at this lovely light in your eyes and he was completely enthralled. And he knew he just had to have you. You could feel it, could feel the way he lusted and hungered after you in the uncomfortable way of how his gaze raked over your body. You felt dirty, sticky with cold sweat after meeting him just once and the worst was yet to come.

He didn’t even gave you time to scream as he snatched you, violently like everything he did. Simply picking you up and throwing you over his shoulder, ignoring your kicking and attempts to fight him off, it was like you were trying to fight off a force of nature, like you were trying to run from a thunderstorm, an endeavor that was simply meant to fail, no matter how good your efforts were. 

What awaited you at your final destination made you pale with indignation and pure terror. Chains clinked against each other and were wrapped so tightly around your limbs, that you could feel your blood circulation breaking, you didn’t even knew his name and he knew nothing about you other than the fact that he had to have you, you were on even ground in that and only in that aspect. 

Even when gagged and blindfolded, you struggled, kicked and clawed at his hands, you fought tooth and nail and every step of the way, which only seemed to amuse him more and more, even when you managed to draw blood, he simply licked the wound clean and then proceeded to gag you with his mouth on yours until your head was spinning from the lack of oxygen and the fire in your lungs.

By the time you learnt his name, you had already discovered a lot of other things about him. For example how absolutely out of it he was, his mind somewhere not entirely here, there was no other explanation for his behavior otherwise, you tried talking, tried to him out but whenever you attempted to just take his poking and prodding, he would keep pushing you, further and further until you snapped, until you started to shout the worst of profanities at him. 

Ricardo simply took it and returned it with a smirk that sent chills down your spine, because it was usually a sign of what was to come. His hands were rough and there was no trace of gentleness to be found in this tug of war he played with you. Your skin was marred with bruises and bitemarks and hickeys and you felt degraded by the time he was panting into your ear like a dog, taking everything from you without a moment’s hesitation. Your freedom, your dignity, even your tears were not safe or sacred. 

If there was someone outside of this dark room in which you were held captive, they cared little about your cries for help, about your shouts of rage and finally your whimpers of pain, before every sob and whine was drowned in the nonsensical rumbling of his voice into your ear, even when you turned away your head to deny him your ear, he simply took it as invitation to mark your already bruised and red splotched neck with more. More marks of possession, more signs that he owned you like a prized belonging. 

In the moments of calm in between each struggle and fight, he became almost soft on you, loosened the restains and helped you get up from where you spent most days curled up in a tight ball of absolute misery and hurt, he rubbed balm onto your sore skin and the dark bruises scarring it, brought you food and drink. And never once did he shut up. 

“It was your eyes, you know?”, he shared with you one day, while watching you massage your swollen ankle, one of his hands finger-walking up the bumpy curve of your bent spine, the touch disgusted you so much, you wanted to lash out yet again, even if you knew it was all for nothing. And when Ricardo shared this piece of knowledge with you, all while leaning smug and satisfied and sickly happy against the headboard of the bed, you stiffened. You wanted nothing more in this moment, than to scratch out your own eyes. You would take any pain, any discomfort and lingering disability if it meant you could defy him, spite him in any way. “When I saw your eyes, I just knew I had to have you.”


	8. Oswald

There was something off about Oswald when you first met him, but since your mother raised you to be open minded and not to judge people simply because of their looks or first impression, you gave him the benefit of the doubt. He really seemed to be a likable guy too, social and nice, maybe not entirely your cup of tea, but still made from solid material. Friend material at best. You enjoyed spending your time outside and digging through the dirt was nothing you minded, so it was only natural for you to help him with the upkeep of the massive garden.

As long as you were around, Oswald seemed upright and honest, maybe a bit too much so, because there was a voice whispering in the back of your mind, muttering things about danger and predator and being careful, it was making you paranoid and hard to give Oswald a fair chance. In the end however, it was not your inability to suppress your instincts that squandered this chance but rather he himself. You caught him red handed, standing too close, his hand closing around a discarded jacket of yours like it was a prized possession of his. 

You knew he saw you, you could see it in the way his eyes flared alive and yet he did not stop, pressed the collar of your jacket against his lower face and took in your scent like a bloodhound, something about the way his eyes narrowed and his lips pulled taunt in a toothy smile, made you shiver, reminded you of the way a wolf would bare his fangs to his weaker prey, to terrorize it, to make the meat taste sweeter from adrenaline. 

Running seemed like a logical option to you. Far, far away from this nut job that you had thought of as the beginnings of a friend, away from the estate, deeper into the forest around it. Anything was better than staying in this fucked up environment, where madness seemed to run wild unchecked. You did not expect him to follow you, to track you down by the scent of your sweat and your blood, as it seemed from the many small nicks and cuts all over your body. 

Oswald was just letting you run blindly, allowing you to tire yourself out so that he could easier snatch you up, so that you would fall into a state of paralyzing exhaustion in which he could carry you into your new home. You cursed the day you had ever laid eyes upon the red moon or upon him and then your stupidity for running off in a wild panic, you should have just went to Lucia. Now it was too late, as the gate of a small cage locked behind you with a sound of finality, one that reminded you of the ancient tradition of ringing church bells at a funeral. 

You had no idea what he wanted from you, you didn’t even know why he was so fascinated with you to begin with, all you did was being skittish around him and help him tend to the garden. It was your blood, you learnt quickly. The scent of it, the taste. Something twisted inside of him longed for your blood and Oswald was either unwilling to fight it off or too weak minded. You were right to fear for your safety around him, to be skittish and shy and hard to pin down, because it was less than a week later when he came at you with his hunter’s knife drawn. 

Screaming and kicking, you felt like you were trying to wrangle a bear with your bare hands, he took your tossing and fighting with a low grunt, dragged you out of your small cage by your wrist and then the blade was pressed against your throat, every frantic jump of your pulse causing the sharpened edge to dig just a little bit deeper into your tender flesh, the cold steel turning foggy from the heat radiating off your skin. 

You didn’t even dared to breathe as the blade slowly wandered from your neck down the line of your collarbones, tracing the shape of your sternum and finally tickling your ribs with dangerous tenderness, you couldn’t help but flinch and the blade caught on, nicked your flesh and tore open your skin. You whimpered from the pain and he groaned from sick delight as his eyes were transfixed on the slow descent of those crimson pearls, as they climbed down the lines of your body to gather in the sharp angle of your hip bone. 

Thinking this is the end of you, you squeezed your eyes shut tightly, only to gasp as his mouth followed the strip of liquid warmth, lapping up every single bit of it. Against the arc of your ribcage, you could feel the blissful grin that curled the corners of his mouth up, that caused his eyes to squint and his throat to produce a sickening deep rumble, akin to the purr of a predator satisfied with its prey. 

“You are so beautiful like this”, he muttered against your shallow wounds, because one was never enough. “This is what you were born for, dear, to bleed beautifully for me. All mine for the taking.”


	9. Mefy

There were no red flags about him, no warning signs, no double meanings, he seemed sincere and kind and this drew you in when you were at your most vulnerable, right after being dropped into a world filled to the brim with creatures of mystical origins, where magic roamed freely and the rules were as different from the ones in your world as the constellation of stars stretching over the night sky. 

In a way, he was baiting you long before you had even learnt about his existence, the lost little lamb that you were, after you had stumbled into this den of hungry wolves. You shied away from Levy’s caustic words, flinched at Lucia’s teasing, squirmed under the spotlight like attention Kurt threw on you, he watched you interact with them all and took in all the small signs of distress, noticed them with satisfaction as you kept returning to his side, both because it was your work and because you seemed to actually relax around him. 

Poor little darling that you were, a heart so completely opposite to his own, free and innocent and still pure whereas his own was tainted and stained with thick, black splotches of hate and jealousy, it was slowly eating up from the inside and being around you proved to be a very powerful balm against the ache of being devoured by his own emotions. It was strange, really, how he couldn’t seem to shake you out of his thoughts, you clung to every single one of them like the pollen from a blooming flower. 

It only changed when you finally seemed to settle in, when you started to read between the lines and out of the gestures more than the spoken word alone, that you became more independent, no longer glued to his side because Mefy was the only calm spot in a chaotic, wild world. You started to interact, worse, you became friends with them, with his brothers and the servants, with the townspeople and everyone but him, you talked about gestures of respect but all he saw was you squandering his attempts at forming a friendship. But maybe you did that because friendship wasn’t what you had in mind?

Oh, you sly little wisp, making him worry so much, this called for some punishment. Mefy smiled and accepted you nonetheless and you were none the wiser of what had just happened. The shift was immediate and it threw you off balance, hard enough to make you lose your words. He had never been one for unnecessary touches, which had been one of the reasons why you came running to him when the others became too much in the beginning. But now, he was worse than Lucia in some ways. His fingers were somehow always in contact with your skin, sending small sparks of magic cold and unpleasant through your nervesystem. 

When you pulled away, he simply smiled at you, gentle and kind and you felt like a complete idiot for thinking something like this, even if the lingering unease remained, you couldn’t connect the dots just yet. Only when the last piece of evidence was provided by none other than he himself, did it all start to make sense. At first, your friends started to disappear, one by one and no one found a single trace of them. You cried against his shoulder and he patted your hair. But this was not enough, as Mefy started to methodically cut you off, string by string he snapped until the remainder of your friends turned away by their own prompting. 

You became tired and lonely once more, he sabotaged your defences until you had no other choice but to make yourself vulnerable again, only then did he strike, fast and suffocating, like a snake entangling you in its coils, now that he had you, he would not let you go again, your innocence, your purity and your sanity was his for the taking, to keep and to treasure. 

“Why I am doing this?”, he laughed so sweetly as he patted your cheek, drank your exhausted, pallid expression in deep before you felt entrapped in that familiar cold tingle of magic again, his arms around you, pressing you so tightly against his chest, that you could feel his heart beating sickeningly fast against your ribs. The feeling of his lips pressed against the roots of your hair was almost pleasant, if not for the ice creeping down your throat, making it impossible to form yet another word as he watched your shaking with broken eyes. “Because I have to, you are such a good person, my darling. I am making a world just for the two of us!”


	10. Lucia

Even though the first thing he did to you upon meeting you, was to relentlessly tease you for your lack of knowledge, you still felt safe around him, safer than around the rest, maybe with the exception of Kurt. No one could hate that adorable ray of sunshine, you thought mere minutes after meeting the young boy. The same could be said about the Lord of this Estate as well. Lucia was cheerful and his boyish charm drew you in before you knew what was happening to you.

His jokes and pranks were kept on a shallow level, never reaching far enough to make you seriously dislike him, even if he was sometimes challenging to get along with. There was something about him that kept drawing you in, even when you tried to pull away. Maybe it was the light in his eyes, which reminded you so much of a calm ocean, serene and peaceful. 

You didn’t even mind it that he kept touching you whenever he could get away with it, mostly since he kept the touches chaste and innocent, a hand on your shoulder, playfully ruffling your hair when you fell for yet another white lie of his, it was sweet, really, the way he acted so much like a big brother around you. It lessened the sting of homesickness and the loneliness that plagued you every night. 

Things started to become strange when you slipped up around Lucia, when you accidentally spilled how much you missed your home and your family. You could, for the span of a heartbeat, see something within those ocean blue eyes that made you gulp down a mouth full of air and sent shivers up your spine. The color had darkened to a dangerous degree, while that spark of mischief had bloomed into a sickeningly bright fire, hell bent to drag you down and drown you with bone crushing current. One lowering of long, red eye lashes later and you were faced with serene, calm oceans again, an impish smile with just a hint of tension left around his lips perfected this mask of his. 

This was the first time you had seen Lucia look like this. But not the residents of this estate. Ever since you had arrived, they had learnt very quickly to treat very lightly around Lucia, especially when it came to you. Within moments, it had appeared that you had taken the spot as his favorite, pushing even his own brothers further away. Even the slightest provocation, the whisper of a hint that someone was even looking at you the wrong way, and Lucia was set off, exploded in a violent manner, so entirely unlike him.

After the slip of your tongue, his touches became less innocent. His hands weren’t wandering to any explicit places and he wasn’t touching you in a lewd manner either, it was just something so entirely off about him, his grip was a bit to tight, teetering on the edge of bruising, he seemed unwilling to let go, even if you went ahead doing work he himself requested from you. And then there was a strange longing, a wistfulness in his voice whenever he talked to you. All in all, he seemed more talkative as well, sharing stories with you, playful tales and funny anecdotes. 

You brushed it off, because what else should you do? Maybe that was just his way of coping with the fact that you would be gone soon. You comforted yourself with the thought that Lucia just tried his best in his own, admittingly weird way. And all the while, you noticed how even fewer of the others wanted anything to do with you, they were, one by one, scared off, intimidated by the murderous glares Lucia shot over your shoulder whenever your head was turned elsewhere, a silent warning and a promise of a world of pain to anyone that were to even breathe in your general direction. The only one that didn’t seem to catch the meaning of Lucia’s glare was Kurt. Or maybe he did and wanted to rescue you. 

“Oh...oh my, you weren’t supposed to see that~”, you were frozen on the spot, halfway in Lucia’s chambers, with your hand still on the doorknob. True, you had just waltzed into his room, but only because you had heard strange sounds coming from inside, a gasp and a gurgle, before something had fallen to the ground. What you didn’t expect to find was Lucia, hands covered in blood, a smudge of red rolling down his cheek like a macabre caricature of a tear spilled. He was smiling, so gently and warmly at you, not even surprised at your sudden entry. But then he followed your wide eyed, horrified gaze downwards, to the bloodied, whimpering bundle at his feet and his smile became a disgusted snarl. Nudging the bundle onto its back with one of his heavy boots, you caught a good glimpse of large, lilac eyes, quickly dulling until the gaze of them broke. Your hands came up, your mouth fell open and Lucia was suddenly right in front of you, pulling you into the cage of his arms, holding you tightly against his chest. He hummed softly, patting your hair and ignoring the blood he kept tainting you with. “It’s alright, dear, it’s alright. No one will blame you, you’re mine after all.”


End file.
